Zero Regrets

(October 9, 2017)


26: All the Devils Are Here

In the end, Wendy led the way into the attic. Dipper insisted on following her up the ladder, his quantum destabilizer pistol out and powered up. As soon as the two of them deployed, Ford came up, reaching back as he sat on the edge of the trap-door hatch for his rifle. Then Eloise, the sensitive, Hazard, Stanley, and Mabel.

The attic lights were only work lights, dim and yellow. Stanford had learned from the building blueprints where the light switches were, down in the janitor's closet, inside the circuit-breaker box, and he had flipped all three of them on. They helped, but just a little.

"Hot up here," Stanley grunted.

"No air-conditioning," Ford said.

"So what do I shoot?"

"Don't fire until we have a clear target. Eloise—what do you sense?"

Eloise whispered, "Can Dipper hold my hand?"

"Go right ahead," Wendy said.

Dipper, who was ambidextrous, shifted his pistol into his left hand and reached his right out to Eloise. The two of them lacked the touch-telepathy that he and Wendy had, but he could tell how frightened she was. Her hand felt ice-cold in his, and he could feel her trembling. "I don't like this place," she whispered. "It's all wrong."

They heard it at the same time, all of them—the high-pitched evil laughter.

And it sounded as if it erupted from a thousand throats.


"Hold her still!" Lorena said.

"We're trying!" Sheila said. She was holding both of Allie's wrists. A moment before, they had been sitting in the living room of Dipper and Wendy's house—and then with no warning, Allie had leaped up, screaming, "No! No!"

Brandi grabbed her around the waist as the terrified girl attempted to bolt for the door. They wrestled her to the floor. "I have to get something!' Lorena yelled. "Keep her still!"

Allie had an amazing strength. She writhed and bucked. Brandi actually had to sit astride her, hands on her roommate's shoulders. Allie screamed incomprehensible sounds, not even words, but a terrible gabble, growling roars, a tortured lioness might make, howls and screams. Sheila came back with a syringe already filled with some liquid. "Roll her over if you can!"

It was a hard fight. Allie flailed and jerked, trying to run from something invisible, shrieking the whole time. Lorena knelt beside her, one knee in the hollow of Allie's left leg, pressing it in place. She yanked the girl's jeans down as far as she could, exposing half of her left buttock.

Then she yanked the needle shield off the syringe. "Here we go. Still as you can hold her!"

Allie didn't even react when Lorena darted the needle into her buttock. Lorena grunted, trying to follow the girl's squirming as she thumbed the plunger down, injecting her.

"It's not working!" Brandi yelled.

"It takes time," Lorena said. "Not like the movies." She recapped the needle and put the empty syringe on the coffee table. Then she helped hold Allie down.

Over three or four minutes, the frantic thrashing subsided, and Allie spoke: "Get it out! Get it out!"

"Sh-sh," Sheila said. They had let her roll onto her back again, and Sheila patted her forehead with a cool wet cloth. "You're all right. You're with us. We'll keep you safe."

"Get it out of my head!"

"It's OK. You're all right now," Brandi said.

"Mommy. I want Mommy."

"Easy, easy," Lorena said.

Five minutes. Seven. At last Brandi lay still, breathing normally.

"Let's get her on the sofa," Lorena said.

She and Sheila lifted Allie and lay her on the sofa. "Brandi, bring a blanket," Lorena said.

Brandi ran to Dipper and Wendy's room and came back with a pillow and a knitted throw decorated with a pine-tree motif, one that Wendy treasured. Allie lay still, murmuring, not screaming.

"What did you give her?" Sheila asked.

"A sedative," Lorena said. "Midazolam. Stanford is an M.D., you know. He doesn't normally practice medicine, but he holds the degree."

"Why didn't it work faster?" Brandi asked.

"It would have if I could have injected it intravenously, but she was moving too much for that. Intramuscular was the best I could manage. Don't believe the movies—sedatives aren't magic. This particular drug puts a person into a kind of twilight sleep. She could probably talk, but later she won't remember anything. It just wipes your short-term memory, but the most important effect is it relaxes her."

"What made her go off like that?"

Lorena looked at Sheila. Both women suspected that their husbands were attacking the thing in the attic. But—

"There's no telling," Sheila said, and Lorena nodded her agreement.


"There," Eloise said. "Right there."

"Stay back," Ford said. He edged in the direction that Eloise had pointed toward. "Stanley, get me some more light here."

"Here ya go, Ford." Stanley, with a quantum destabilizer cradled in the crook of his right arm, held one of Fiddleford's compact, brilliant flashlights in his left. Its blue-white glare revealed cobwebs swaying from the metal ceiling support grid, slender gleaming silver threads dotted with dust particles. The floor was heavy plywood, unpainted, unfinished, but deeply covered with maybe fifty years of dust.

"Don't see anything," Stan said. "Are we getting close?"

"Be careful," Eloise said. "You're nearly on top of—"

Everything changed.


Allie moaned but did not thrash around. Her back arched and she said, "They're here. They're here!"

Her voice sounded so strange, so inhuman, that Brandi put her hands over her ears.

"You can go into the bedroom if you want," Lorena said. "Sheila and I will watch over her."

"I won't," Brandi whispered. "I'd want her to stay with me. I'll stay with her." Brandi had pulled a chair up near the sofa. She took the other girl's hand. "I'm here for you," she said. "I won't let anything happen to you. You're safe. We're with you. You're safe."

"Want it to end," moaned Allie. "Mommy. I want it to end, I want it all to end."

Lorena and Sheila exchanged another glance. This was it. This was the root of the suicides.

This was the origin of evil.


In the attic, Dipper gripped Eloise's hand as they dragged him down—skeletal hands, corpse hands, rose from the undulating waves of fire that burned his legs. "Wendy!" he yelled, but he couldn't even hear his own voice.

Stan again had that strange double vision. In one sense, he stood just where he had been, in the attic, Ford next to him, jerking and fighting something not visible. Overlaid on that was the hellscape, liquid fire nearly knee-deep, with demonic forms grinning and gibbering and reaching out for him and the others. Mabel was on her knees, the phantom arms gripping her hair, her clothes, trying to drag her under to drown in fire.

With a snarled curse, Stan waded to her side, grabbed her arm—she screamed and tried to bite him, but he dragged her to her feet. "Mabel, Pumpkin, it's me! Grunkle Stan! Close your eyes! Close 'em! Here—put your foot out—that's the trap door. Here's the ladder—climb down, get outa here! I'll save the others! Go!"

Mabel, her eyes tight shut, ducked through the hatch, then picked up speed as she climbed downward, gaining confidence.

Wendy flailed with her axe, cutting nothing but imaginary arms—but she was too close to Dipper. Stan waited for the backswing, grabbed the axe haft just under the head, then yelled into Wendy's ear: "Stop it! You're gonna hurt Dipper! Here—here, give me your left hand! OK, I'm gonna put it on Dipper's arm. Think to him! Let him know this is all just bullshit illusion!" He made the connection—

Dipper!

Wendy! Eloise is sinking—

Back away. Drag her. It's not real. It looks and feels real, but it's not!

And across the room, Hazard bellowed into Ford's ear, "I got you, Chief!"

"Hazard? Get away if you can!"

"Not real, Chief. You know me. I got no imagination to speak of. Just shadows and hallucination. Get hold of yourself."

Stanford took deep breaths. "I think—I think—I know—"

"Grunkle Stan!" Dipper yelled. They had let Eloise climb down the ladder, down to a waiting, shaken Mabel. Now he and Wendy had fought their way close to Ford and Hazard. "I think it's under the dust! The anchor we're looking for! It's something hidden under the dust!"

"I got it, Sixer!" Stanley yelled. "I ain't as bad affected as you!" He ripped off his jacket and with the brilliant light on the floor, he began to wipe away layers of concealing dust. "Can ya see this?"

"It looks as if you're kneeling in flames!"

"Nuts to that! Here's something red, looks like the edge of a big circle—"

Something lashed at him, and with a yell, Stanley reared back as though punched on the chin, landing flat on his back.

"There!" Hazard said. "There it is!"

"Back off!" Wendy yelled. "Dipper, gotta do this one-handed. Don't let go of me! Gotta use my axe!"

They waded through flames—or that's what Dipper saw—past his grunkle, who lay ominously still, fire licking his inert body.

"Gah!" Wendy swung her axe.

"You're on it!" Hazard said. "Again!"

Using only her right arm, Wendy chopped again. Her special axe drew a silver arc in the air that hung on, like a supernatural rainbow of power.

Again. Again.

The flames abruptly vanished.

"Stand away!" Hazard yelled.

Wendy dragged Dipper back. Now they seemed to wade through a rotten slimy mud, unutterably ugly demonic bodies, skeletal, decaying, parchment flesh over bones, rising and sinking and clutching at them.

Hazard fired her weapon. The whole attic blazed with fierce red light.

Then she hit the target again. And again.

Overhead, the incandescent bulbs in their metal shades exploded in showers of hot sparks.


Far to the southeast, in an assisted-living home, an old woman named Myrtle woke up from an afternoon nap. Her heart fluttered strangely, and her breath came shallow.

She eased herself out of bed and into her bedside chair turned to the side, jerked open the top drawer of her desk, and pulled out a pad of lined paper. "Pen, pen," she grumbled, rummaging through the drawer. She found a fine-tipped permanent marker, the one she used to label her possessions. That would do.

She had not put on her glasses. She leaned close, her nose almost touching the desk surface, the odor of the pen alcohol-sweet in her nose, as with a shaky line she drew what she had just vividly dreamed: two circles, concentric, with symbols at the center and between the rims of the two circles. They were as exact as she could remember. At the top, she wrote "For Wendy Corduroy Pines, Western Alliance University, urgent."

Then she leaned back, breathing heavily. Her heart wasn't beating right. It was pounding, but somehow thinly, as if it pumped little blood.

Her vision clouded. She saw her room through a gray fog.

"It's done," she whispered. "They finished it somehow. I'm coming, Clarissa."

In her fading perception, she saw a leering, evil, goat-headed apparition ahead, its impossibly long tongue lolling, dripping strings of thick drool, its black-clawed hand reaching out, beckoning her.

"Oh get out of my way," she said irritably. "You're not even real. You're nothing."

The writhing creature faded, and in its place stood a young girl, looking lost and terrified.

"Clair," Myrtle Bordein yelled, though it came out as a whisper. "I'm here. It's all right now. I'm coming to you. It's all right."

And quite peacefully, the old woman died.


To be continued